A while back, a lot of my fellow garden bloggers dedicated posts to the Garden Whimsy in their gardens, so this is a very belated, and rather sparse attempt to spotlight the very few whimsical elements of our garden. When I read about the wonderfully creative things going on at sites such as Mr. McGregor's Daughter, Clay and Limestone, Does Everything Grow Better in My Neighbor's Yard, and The Transplantable Rose, I felt a bit like I had been invited to a really cool, sophisticated party, but nobody warned me about the attire, and I showed up unshaven, wearing my Paris Métro T-Shirt and faded jeans. You see, we have so little to qualify as garden whimsy around our place, but now that I've seen some of the cool things others are doing, we've vowed to make some progress in that regard very soon. I've already located two gargoyles (including a never finished one a former student made for me in ceramics class), and a resin cast one I bought at Target a few years ago (LOL!). So unless you count some of the arrangements of the boulders in front, this will bring us up to a whopping three items we'll incorporate into the garden...So ... here's tonight's subject: our Lion Head Birdbath ... get a good look folks, because other than more rocks, that's our whimsy writ large. This is our ad hoc, yet we think attractive, birdbath constructed from a basin we bought at Lowe's and a Lion's Head that Fernymoss acquired years ago from an architect friend of his father's ... at one time this magnificent lion graced the façade of some long since demolished building in downtown Des Moines ... and oddly enough, it now resides in our back yard, functioning as a bird bath support. The bird bath is the centerpiece of the ring of rocks we have around the blue spruce in the back, and though it's overrun by weeds presently (as it tends to do), you can see what it looks like, engulfed by the savage growth under the tree.
The spruce has always been really problematic area for us to try to get things growing, and even the grass won't grow under it ... we've tried Lupines (they died after the first year), strawberries (they lasted a couple of years), hardy Cyclamen (they never came up) and a few other plants, ... you get the picture. The last couple of years, we haven't even tried (due to demands elsewhere in the garden). Sum result: it's overrun with weeds, again. Fernymoss and I have had several discussions about what to do with this spot, and finally we decided that about the best we can do is to get everything out of there, put down some landscape cloth (which we generally loathe), and cover it up with river rock. We give up trying to find something that will thrive in the soil around this tree. I suppose we could try hardy azaleas, but we're not that fond of them and they do tend to be pricey plants, so ... what we envision now is an area we won't have to plant, weed, or otherwise pay much attention to to keep it looking nice. We figure that we can put appropriate plants grown in pots there for some color and interest ... with the minimum amount of maintenance other than watering, which happens frequently with the bird bath anyway....
At this point, that seems the most prudent way for us to go, since the spruce presents such a challenging growing situation, one that we don't have the time or ambition to try to tackle anymore after our previous efforts, and besides, it could end up looking more attractive than if we had flowers growing there. Container gardening can be a gardener's best friend for difficult situations, so that's the way we want to go with this space in the future. Whether that happens this year or next, I'll make sure to post any progress we make in this most difficult spot in the back garden....
I thought I'd just add a link to what I've been listening to as I wrote this post ... For you Tom Waits fans out there, he's doing a Glitter and Doom tour this summer, and NPR has a handy link to listen to the concert he gave in Atlanta in July. (h/t to my good blogger friend Dada for sending me the link!) If you're familiar with Tom Waits' work, you'll hear a great mix of his older material with new songs from his current tour. If you're not familiar with his work, I'll just say it may be an acquired taste ... Waits has always distinguished himself by his very strange fusion of outright weirdness and blues, and this particular concert is a great showcase for how wonderfully strange his music can be.
Clickeat emptor ...
